Educate your children!

thanks for the kind words, it has been a long road

Since the Internet is more or less anonymous I can be totally honest. Two years ago we bought a house for $160,000 and we made about 60k a year combined. At the time we had no debt, but buying a house IS buying debt so we need furniture and on and on. Last July (2003) I found misled too ill to work at all, 6,700 in debt and my husband took a pay cut! It was really bad. His regular job income (take home) was/is $21,900. We refinanced the mortgaeg from 1,00 a month to 958. While this added to our debt (we rolled in the closing costs) we HAD to get our monthly payment lowered. The biggest thing for me was MAKING THE COMMITMENT TO MYSELF TO CHANGE! That is the secret. I returned everything possible that I had bought over the past few months that weren’t essential. I sold my beloved harp (i hadn’t played it in a while and I owed money on it) I got rid of premium cable, I never ate out and on and on.

THE MONEY YOU SAVE IN THESE PLACE YOU MUST APPLY TO YOUR DEBT! Again, the real and only secret is I COMMITTED to doing it. So did my husband. Here is the unpleasant part. He took a second job and I sold stuff on Ebay. If you want to get out of debt faster, you’ve got to make more money. Not a job that is far from home (more gas) or that you need to dress up for, but a tempary job. Office or house cleaning is ideal. Next, to really rid myself of the debt, I followed an Accelerated Margin plan. This is where you pay one bill at a time. I will put the link at the bottom of the page,. The other thing that totally helped us and again, this might not work if you have bad credit, is we took out a loan. the interest was so much better then our credit cards and that really helped us pay everyhting faster. After the loan we only had about $700 left in debt and we would use any money we had, (extra jobs, NO buying coffee in the morning) and applied it to our debt. One of the most useful tips I have
is selling on ebay if possible.

It has made such a difference. When we get money through Paypal, we pay our bills for FREE (savings on stamps) through Paypal. So if I sold a $20.00 shirt I would take that money or even half of it and online, put it towards, say the sears card debt. Just chipping away at it a little extra at a time. Read books, the tightwad gazette, the dollar stretcher (on line) anything. But the real key is doing some serious soul searching and figure out WHY you spend. This is what has stopped me from going BACK into debt. That’s my mom, in debt,out of debt, in deb,t out of debt. I think it’s because she hasn’t faced why she spends. To me I feel I “earned” it. I work hard, I deserve nice things, I’ll pay it tomorrow. Those are my demons with money. I have too many tips for saving money, if you want to know anything specific or have a questions, please ask! Good luck!!!